One in four Europeans choose Firefox

An interesting story that originates in Europe today, brought to our attention courtesy of DesktopLinux.com, states that nearly a quarter of European Web surfers do their surfing with Firefox which, according to the story, has the browser market share of 24 percent. When I went to school, that was close enough to say “one in four.”

“Firefox browser usage has increased substantially — by nearly 5 percent — in Europe over the past year, French web analyst firm XiTi reports,” says the story. “During the week of March 5 through 11, 2007, the open-source browser exceeded 24 percent share of Europe’s browser market, according to the market researcher.”

Slovenia and Finland have the most per capita users, in the mid-40s percentage-wise, and Germany is in the mid-30s.

We in the U.S. — with a meager 15 percent of the browsing public using Firefox — are slowly but surely getting on the bandwagon, since figures have Firefox steadily climbing, but a far cry from the 78 percent market share that Internet Exploder forces on most of the public.

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)